Osamu Tezuka's short film "Legend of the Forest" is a short thirty minute film that employs Tchaikovsky's fourth symphony to tell the story of the forces of nature (both natural and supernatural) fighting against humans wanting to destroy their forest home. This experimental production wears its influences of its sleeve, employing numerous animation styles, beginning with realistically drawn still frames, to magic lantern eye tricks, and then changing tempo with fully animated Max Fleischer-like slapstick, a little bit of Winsor McCay (think "Gertie the Dinosaur"), Disneyfied technicolor romance (and pathos) between two flying squirrels, and ending it all with a mash up between "Fantasia" like spirits of the forest and Hanna-Barbera inspired lumberjacks.Well worth checking out for fans of anime and regular old animation in general.

LEGEND OF THE FOREST (like ASTRO BOY and KIMBA and a great deal of what Tezuka did) gives us someone else's perspective on things- and it's STILL a timely message (more so than ever, actually, with corporations clogging and poisoning our waterways and bringing the world itself to the very edge of Extinction). The fluidity of the animation here is to be envied- especially when one takes into account the fact that this is a film animated by HAND (as opposed to being cranked out on a computer). Says Tezuka himself: "... the joy of creating a film by hand cannot be beaten. Computer graphics makes working today in film very easy, but it also makes the end product cold and banal." (In this, he echoes the sentiments of Ray Harryhausen, who said in one NPR interview that "The magic is gone from animation.") There's form with computer animation, but it's often without substance. Tezuka: "I really wanted to keep the preciousness of the hand animation in the work. But I never want to make this type of film again." (It ain't easy, folks: I once did an animated sequence for a now-defunct website; it wasn't easy.) "Even the large epic animations made by Automation if they lack passion will not be evaluated well," Tezuka pointed out. "I never make work that is careless."

I used to have mixed feelings about this animated short: On one side, I admired the unique use of different animation styles and the great homage done to the history of animation, but on the other side, I didn't know what to think the heavy-handed story and the preachy last segment. However, now I consider that, even with a flawed plot, this short deserves to be recognized as an incredible effort that was ahead of its time. Done as an homage to "Bambi" and "Fantasia" this movie uses different animation styles, but instead of using those styles in different segments (Like most of anthology animated movies tend to do) this movie follows a single storyline, something that was done several years later by anime movies such as "Mind Game" and ""Dante's Inferno: An Animated Epic".Several references are made here, from the early animated shorts done Émile Cohl and Gertie the Dinosaur to the classic animated films done by Disney...And the result is really impressive: While this kind of experimental anime is nothing unusual in the recent years, in the time where this made (1987) it was something incredibly risky and rare. I'm not even sure if modern animators will take the risk to do something so ambitious as this.Now, the dark thing about this fascinating short is the story: While at first it looks like it was something borrowed from Disney, several darker elements are shown, such as death and tragedy. But also, there is some certain level of cynicism in the story: While there are indeed some degree of demonization in the portrayal of the human beings (Especially in the last part) the animals from the forest aren't innocent creatures either, being shown to be arrogant, violent and vengeful. From a certain point of view, it could be a deconstruction of how other animated movies with ecological themes tend to portray the animals as completely innocent characters. Sadly, at the ending, the demonization of humans is played straight and that affects the overall content of this short. However, this doesn't make it any less interesting. Similar themes are explored in the movie "Princess Mononoke" from Hayao Miyazaki.

I don't know much about Osamu Tezuka, but he must have been interested in animation's history because he walks through a series of styles here, from stick drawings and repetitive loops reminiscent of the earliest works in the early 20th century, through a progression of Disney and anime styles, and even one section that reminded me of the Flintstones.The storytelling itself follows along in the style of the animations, the types of stories that were told at the time. Simple slapstick at the beginning, some parts very similar to fantasia, and an anime-style ending where rapidly-growing plants kill and smother an entire tree-cutting colony.The overall theme is obviously environmental but with a definite dark angle to it, and it gives this animation a bit of a kick.